The Part-Time Trader (3 page)

While I like working with these individual types, I don't expect much in the way of courage from them. They simply prefer going unnoticed so much that they, in moments of crisis, are unlikely to come through for you. But in the grand scheme of things, they will not interfere with your work unless absolutely necessary, and when they do intervene, it is usually at a much more nonthreatening level of reason. We'll call them “Gary.”

Here's where we delve into the final two categories where one takes action and the other simply wishes he would. The latter hates his job. He's a pushover who needs the paycheck just like the rest of us, but the paranoia of losing that paycheck pushes him to do anything and everything asked of him by those above him and by his coworkers as well. The thought of not taking on every request made of him, and the requestor of those tasks possibly going to the boss man to complain, is all the motivation that he needs to essentially bow to anyone and everyone. They are the “Larrys” of the corporate world.

I have known plenty of these types, and, honestly, you have to pity them more than anything else. I have tried to talk to so many of them over the years, to embolden them to take pride in themselves and learn to use the magical word “no” when they are given excessive and unnecessary demands on the job.

I am guilty as well. I have, from time-to-time, taken advantage of their willingness to do anything they are asked to do and, in the process, dumping some of my own workload on them, simply because I knew they would not refuse to do it and that they would get the job done and usually done incredibly well. While they may be the ones that are most often stepped on, they are usually the most talented and overlooked employees in the organization.

I mean, why would I waste my time asking a Debbie or Edward when I knew that they would weasel their way out of helping me, all the while still finding a way to take credit for the task at the end of the day?

The skill set that the Larrys possess is there, and they should be thriving in their area of expertise. The only problem is that they are missing that critical element of faith that allows them to break away from the doldrums of a job they could not be more dissatisfied with, and venture out into their own and actually enjoy what they do for once.

Of all the people in the corporate world, this is the type you don't want to become. It results in long hours at the workplace, as well as anxiety, paranoia, and a sense of loss of one's own identity. I know this because I shared a lot of these characteristics, where early on in my career, I tried to be all things to all people. On one such occasion the boss man (actually boss woman at the time) came into my office about complaints about the backlog on my workload. I finally told her how I simply could not get all the work done at a pace faster than what it was coming in at; she was not mad or upset at all, but instead asked me why I never bothered to ask for help.

To me, it seemed like an admission of weakness on my part, but it really was not. At the end of the day, and not because of my own doing, I was able to offload my work, reduce my stress, and do better-quality work since the balance between reality and expectations finally evened out.

I truly would have been miserable; in fact, I would have probably had a breakdown had my superior not confronted me about it early on. Breaking away from the willingness to be another Larry and recognizing the need to not be everyone's “yes man” propelled me to eventually find a way out, which brings me to the last category: the “Ryan” employee.

As previously mentioned, there is plenty of overlap between the Larrys and Ryans. They make great friends because of their mutual desire to leave the misery they find themselves in. In that sense, they have a lot in common and find each other to be a refuge for the frustrations they will not voice publicly. The ultimate difference between the two is that one will and one won't. Larry will complain and wish and dream of the day that he becomes self-sustaining and sufficient, while Ryan will ultimately do exactly that and brush aside the excuses that Larry makes for himself.

While the parallels between the aforementioned groups are obvious, they eventually pull away from each other. Larry will continue on the path that he has always been on, keeping his frustrations to himself, while Ryan will grow increasingly cynical in his job and hate it more and more every single day. While this person is dependent on his job and in need of it, he also realizes that steps must be taken in the present to begin the process of ultimately leaving his current career behind. This process, for me, lasted nearly four years. I had to start from scratch, but like any journey you take in life, no matter how long it is, it is paramount you make that first step.

At times I wanted to give up. As a part-time trader, I experienced losing streaks and would grow tired and restless and would doubt my ability to ever be able to do it full-time. The winning streaks would allow for jubilation and a sense that freedom was right around the corner. I was a swing trader who was learning to trade around the balances of corporate life and managing a blog that would unknowingly become something entirely bigger one day.

My skills as a trader were solid; they had been honed over years of trial and error, through reading books that improved my mental state during the trade, and by others who—had I taken the advice they were spewing—would have derailed my entire operation. The biggest help to my trading was simply experience—that costly education that trading always requires, that we all wish to avoid, but in the end, are so glad we were able to experience.

Trading on the job has perks that full-time trading cannot provide, as it allows for the trader to polish his skills and experience trading's road traps without being adversely affected—assuming, of course, you are not relying on your paycheck to backfill your losses, instead of providing for life's essentials, you know, the important stuff like food, water, and shelter.

Embrace the idea that you are a part-time trader on track to become the real deal. Despite the sideshows I had allowed myself to become engaged in, with the hopes of finding a quick exit out of the corporate world (i.e., real estate), trading in the stock market was not just an exit strategy but a passion and love that was fully cultivated in my life. I did not see Apple as a company that made fancy phones and tablets but as “AAPL.” Microsoft wasn't the creator of Windows and Xbox but simply a four-letter symbol: MSFT.

The journey at hand would not happen overnight, but I would get there with a plethora of success and mistakes, frustration, and excitement. I knew, though, that ultimately I'd get that yellow ticket to full-time traderhood while shedding the chains that had weighed me down in a job I immensely disliked.

Life was so much simpler a hundred years ago. Of course, the opportunities for success were limited in comparison to what they are today, particularly with the creation of the Internet. Despite the lack of advancements, comparatively speaking, life was much more orderly. You knew your place in society. If you were born a Rockefeller, you knew that you were destined to leadership, innovation, and a life filled with luxury and surplus.

If you were born a “Joe Shmoe” like most of the population, you worked a 9-to-5 job. No weekend work and definitely nothing on Sundays. It might involve laboring with your hands on a Ford conveyor belt or working behind a desk counting beans. Either way, there were boundaries to life. You knew when you clocked out that you were done for the day. No e-mails, no pagers, no late night cell phone calls demanding that you come into the office because some shipment in Southeast Asia was delayed and wouldn't make delivery in Fresno, California, before 8 A.M.

Perhaps I was made for a different era, but the times we live in now have drastically changed, and everything has become a bundle of complications. How often do you sit at a desk at work and your job skill may be a “quality engineer,” but you are not really inspecting for quality but for how much a certain widget meets the requirements for a certain form. And in that form there are tons of questions, blanks, and check boxes that you are required to fill out for whether said widget passes inspection.

In reality, you aren't really a quality engineer but more like a professional “form-filler-outer.” I know that might offend some, but it is true. Not noticing an inherent flaw in product when filling out these forms could result in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) being in your office within 48 hours. The stress is real, and it affects us emotionally and physically. In my time working in Corporate America, three different individuals that I worked with committed suicide, with the reason often having its roots in their job.

Corporations have become so obsessed with process improvements, flowcharts, and metrics that they have made human ingenuity extinct and reasoning a lost art. The Garys, Larrys, and Ryans of the world feel helpless and relegated to being a chink in the armor of the Edwards and Debbies.

Getting back to how working in this day and age is so much more different than just a short time ago, I often consider e-mailing and the role that it plays in the workplace. I often recall how on any given day, I could get 150 to 200 e-mails and have Edward and Debbie coming by my office within an hour or two following up on that e-mail asking what the “status” was or better yet complaining why you had yet to reply to their e-mail. Of all the technological advancements we have seen, I think the worst one ever created was the blasted “cc:” option, where people who don't really need to be included in the e-mail are included anyway. That “cc:” is probably one of the most inefficient and unnecessary workplace concepts created to date, often leading to people being consumed with the task of how many people of importance they can include so that they can make their voice unnecessarily heard.

On one such occasion, a person was trying to do a cookie fundraiser for their church, and somehow “cc'd” the e-mail out to over 15,000 employees when they only meant it for their department. The worst part of it all was that there was a 10-megabyte file included in the e-mail, and when it was sent out, people replied to all requesting that they be left off of the distribution list, and not knowing themselves they were replying to the entire organization. Most of the responses included that huge attachment that literally crippled the network for days with over 500 people replying nearly simultaneously to the large e-mail and attachment.

Who knew that an innocent e-mail coming from the hourly employees in accounts payable could be responsible for someone being fired for exposing the underlying weakness of “cc'ing” one too many people on a work e-mail? It literally had to be one of my top five favorite days on the job, because without a network, I could not do any work, and that meant I got to go home early and work from home—or I should say trade from home.

How about e-mail organization? I came across some of the most neurotic individuals in the workplace. They refused to ever delete a single e-mail, even one of those stupid spam e-mail forwards that they had received already a dozen times, the latest corporate staff reshuffle, or one of those newsletters offering the latest deals on Groupon. Seriously, people were that paranoid and uptight that the thought of deleting a single e-mail would eventually bite them in the butt should they ever need to access it and maybe result in their demise at the job they held.

If you are so paranoid about your job that you can't afford to delete a single e-mail, you really need psychological help. To add to it, these people, often the Debbies and Edwards, would have a category and subcategory for every e-mail type imaginable. Consider this: if the e-mail was about a past due invoice that the corporation had yet to pay, they would assign a special color for a certain priority level, then put it in the subcategory entitled “Company ABC” that followed the previous categories of “Accounts Payable,” “Invoicing,” “2012,” “December.” Yes, four subcategories deep.

Such categorization epitomizes workplace inefficiency, yet it calms the storms of paranoia for the Debbies and Edwards who feel the need to document every e-mail in such detail that if they actually tried to find the e-mail, they would spend more time trying to search out the actual folder the e-mail was deposited in than if they had simply left the e-mail in the original inbox.

Without getting too sidetracked on the pains of corporate life, it's worth reminding that while this book is about trading, it is also about recognizing the perplexities that exist among the common workers in Corporate America, and without the desire to break out from the stranglehold that it puts 99 percent of its employees in, they will be stuck just working for the boss man in hopes of one day finding a candle at the end of the dark tunnel. Unfortunately, what they find out is that the candle was never lit to begin with.

But with that said, you still need your job, and you need it in a bad way; otherwise, why would you still be working?

As you already well know by now, I hated my job and every aspect of it. There were times where I really felt like a prisoner in my own office. The reason was that biweekly paycheck that I was dependent on. My home, my cars, the food, and the health insurance were all possible because of this job, and that paycheck that took away my sense of identity as well as everything about my life that had seemed important to me.

Monday through Friday I dreaded. Saturday I enjoyed. Sunday, I became depressed, not because I was enjoying my second day off from the grinds of paper labor, but because I knew it was my last day off, and the moment I went to sleep that night, it would be only a moment before I woke up and realized a full five days of the “same-old, same-old” was ahead of me. It was a cycle that I dreaded and did not enjoy the least bit.